Strangled - Brian McGrory [6]
I cut him off with a simple “Not now, Peter. I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
He didn’t say anything at first, and I thought he might have been thinking about his two wedding days and the failed marriages that followed, and the fact that he wakes up every day now very much alone, married, as the cliché goes, to his job. Instead, he said with an unvarnished tone of hope, “So you mean you might be available to write today?”
Everyone — absolutely everyone — has their own agenda in this breaking story we call life.
“I have to sort a few things through, Peter,” I said, my own tone betraying some incredulity that I have not an ounce of doubt he failed to detect. “I’ll let you know if I’m up.”
He hesitated again, and I saw his eyes form a squint and his lips start to move as if he was about to ask a question, when the aged and lovable Edgar Sullivan, director of Boston Record security, ambled through the room and arrived at my desk.
“Special delivery for Jack Flynn,” Edgar announced, his tongue inside his cheek, where it often is.
Martin flashed a look of relief over the fact he now had the perfect excuse not to wander into the deep, dark forest of my personal life. Without so much as a good-bye, he spun on his heels and walked quickly toward his office.
Edgar handed me a manila envelope. “This was just dropped off at the front desk.”
I looked at the envelope for a moment, bearing only my name on the cover. It wasn’t handwritten, but rather in small typeface, which struck me as somewhat odd, but not necessarily alarming. In other words, I was wondering why Edgar had brought it up himself.
Which is when he said, “I hear today’s a big day for you, Jack. I couldn’t be happier. She’s a wonderful woman. You’re doing exactly the right thing.”
He was standing over my desk. I was sitting. The room behind him was a half-lit haze of empty expanse. I replied, “I’m not going through with it, Edgar.”
Without hesitation he said, “In that case, you’re doing exactly the right thing.” He said this with the slightest little smile forming in the wrinkles around his mouth.
And you wonder why I love the guy.
I leaned far back in my chair as he leaned against my desk. “How long have you been married?” I asked.
“Forty-seven years —” he replied proudly, as he absently stretched his arms over his head and locked his fingers together.
“That’s really wonderful,” I interjected.
“To four different women,” he finished.
Ah. It’s probably worthwhile to point out here that Edgar looked like a cross between Ward Cleaver and the Maytag Repairman. I mean, he looked like he had dinner waiting on the table every single night that he walked through the door at 6:00 p.m. sharp. Saturday night, he and the missus would go to a movie. Sunday morning was church. They called the kids on Sunday nights. Needless to say, I was somewhere between bemused and floored, or maybe a combination of the two.
“How long to the current one?” I asked.
“I’m currently between wives,” he said, a mischievous look in his eyes.
“Okay, the most recent one.”
“Seven years. It was a pretty good run. The one before was my personal record — fourteen years. My first and second ones were thirteen years apiece.”
“You have trouble when you get into the early teens, huh?”
“It’s hell,” he said with a big smile. He stood straight up, slapped my thigh, and said, “Jack, whatever you do today, you’ll do the right thing.” And he was gone.
As Edgar limped off, I pulled the envelope open and dumped the insides on a bare patch on my desk. Out slid a folded sheet of paper and a slightly heavier placard of some sort.
I picked up the heavier object, which turned out to be a Massachusetts driver’s license for a woman by the name of Jill Dawson, who, if my math was correct, was thirty-two years of age. She wasn’t smiling, but she had the kind of practiced closemouthed camera look that I had been trying to acquire for about thirty years with precisely no success. A good-looking woman,